Amazing article. I'm a fan. Every word of it hit home. I wish I had read this 10 years ago, before I found out I too was not indestructible.

2:10 pm March 29, 2013

Monish Sharma wrote:

Great advice and thank you for sharing. What I have observed through the medical history of my Dad as is that there is a great problem to solve here as most heart attacks don't happen because the heart is weak but rather the arteries leading to it deteriorate. The heart then generally starts starving for oxygen and nutrients and has difficulty functioning and subsequently gets weaker with heart attacks. There ought to be a medical checkup method to check the condition of the arteries to determine risk probabilities of heart attack from coronary heart disease issues.

2:20 pm March 30, 2013

Kip Rode wrote:

Check out the movie Forks over Knives on Netflix. It talks about how through diet heat disease need never be a problem. Also on nutritionfacts.org check out "Uprooting the Leading causes of Death" It is an hour long video on how diet can prevent the top 15 leading killers of people in the US today. The best way to solve a problem is to prevent it from occurring in the first place.

8:35 am April 1, 2013

Andrea Ciolkowski wrote:

This really "hit home" as I just experienced an unexpected illness and I was resistant to miss work and commitments! I will refer back to this article many times and thank you!

This author is still full of grandiosity. He obviously didn't "resign" from Harvard. He didn't have a permanent appointment in the first place from which resignation would have raised eyebrows, at least in the manner implied in the article. I'm guessing he had adjunct, mostly summer, appointments, or fellowships, which allowed him to give a lecture now and then. Many professionals in law, business, and medicine do this. Besides, doing this is not called "being in academics." Academics is a much longer haul.

I had a minor heart attack (second marginal of the circumflex) just before my 50th birthday. I had been running since the age of 18 and working out in gyms, but I can't say I felt indestructible, just relieved that I was keeping physical problems at bay, and even those, I discovered, not very successfully.l

I've seldom found such epiphanies to be of value. Those experiencing them are likely not people who read Sartre and Camus, Wittgenstein and Russell, Freud and Jung, Shakespeare and Milton, Keats and Auden with any depth in college. They have not had the lifelong grappling with these issues. They are mostly emotional simpletons who because of their supposed success in other fields have the grandiosity to presume that no one has discovered what they find themselves discovering in middle age.

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For aspiring or actual entrepreneurs, The Accelerators is an online archive of discussion among startup mentors– entrepreneurs, angel investors and venture capitalists. Although the blog is no longer being updated, its content lives here and you can see an archive of its tweets through June 2015 @wsjstartup.